Episode 372

Hello everybody and welcome to Unshakeable With Human Design. I am so excited to be here with you. I’m your host, Nicole Laino, and we’re here just as today. It is the month of May, which at the time you are listening to this, I believe it is May the fourth, and I am a huge Star Wars fan. So may the fourth be with you all.

May we actually, if you guys didn’t listen already, we did the transit episode. Christina Luna and I did the May Transit episode, and I talked about how, actually, if you’re listening to this, on the day that the episode is released, which is May 4th, then yesterday, May 3rd is the day that we officially moved over into the second gate in the transits.

Christina and I talked about this on the May Transit episode. And I’m gonna talk about it not for very long here. I’m just gonna mention this, that we’re moving into the second quarter of the human design wheel. And what does that mean? It means that each quarter is broken into a different theme. The first theme is us thinking about things and taking stuff in and having these ideas and little sparks lit.

It’s about thinking and imagining things, and kind of like getting up the courage to make a move. And now here we are in the second quarter, which is about making the move, like making it and not just making the first move. That’s sort of what that first phase is about. It’s like. Ideation. Let, let’s light the spark.

Let’s go. Let’s see what’s here. We’ve kind of been like playing around with the clay and figuring out, okay, what are we gonna make here? Then the second quarter is where we make something. The second quarter is where we take action to build something. It is continuous action. It is about concretizing bringing into form.

This is the manifestation quarter. So this is such a ripe time to take the things that you’ve been thinking about and make them happen. And how we do this in alignment is we have to commit. We commit and that’s what strategy and authority helps us with so much. Now in this episode we’re gonna talk about scaling.

So I’m gonna talk specifically about how I took my business from 10 K to consistent to $25,000 months, which we make more than that, but like on average, what I can say is consistent and I feel comfortable saying to you. We are at consistent 20 5K months. Like we had a $40,000 month in March, but I don’t wanna talk about the one-off.

I’m talking about the consistent one. And the consistent is 25,000. So what I can count on is $25,000 months. And I did it without working more. And this is really what scaling is to me. Honestly. Scaling is about getting smarter about how you build your business. That’s really what it’s about. It’s how do we.

Scale, and you know, you can scale and blow up and you can blow up your payroll and you can hire a huge team and all of that. But I’m not Grant Cardone, that’s not my way. That’s not the type of business that I can have really, because I’m a coach and it doesn’t mean that I can’t have a big business. It’s just I do need to be, at least at this point of my business, I do feel like I need to be personally involved with it.

I feel like that’s what I do. I feel like that’s who I am, and the biggest part of my business is the business by design, mentorship, and I don’t really know how to do that with taking me out of it and still making it that same level of service that we provide and that level of excellence that we provide in there.

It’s a special container, and it’s not just me, but I think without me it would be very, very different. I don’t know what it would be without me. It’s that interaction that I have with our clients. It is that close connection that we have. So I’m not gonna scale by hiring 15 coaches or hiring this huge team, and I’ve hired people and I haven’t had it work.

And that scaling to me was, I had to get better at making those decisions. What do I need? And when the definition is sort of growing quickly without necessarily having to work more or blow up my payroll. So I more than doubled our revenue in the last two years without working more hours and without massively expanding my team.

We did expand our team, but with contractors who just sort of take care of very specific things in the business and not like full-time members of our team. So I have an operations manager and then I have a podcast manager who produces this show. And then I have a YouTube manager who manages the YouTube, and that’s brand new.

He just joined us. So those are two are contractors. And then I have like my right hand woman, my operations manager, but that’s it. And then it’s just me. So we’ve been able to do that and we are continuing to grow and what we’re forecasting for this year is to grow again. Probably adding another, you know, growing by another.

I’d like to see by another a hundred thousand dollars a year this year. But we’ll see. We’re on track right now to almost hit that number and we have some things planned, but it’s about making smart moves. So I called this Scaling by Design. Why is it scaling by design? Because I think you only get to make those very smart decisions if you’re very grounded.

And we’re gonna talk about the role human design plays in both that grounding process and then also the marketing piece and how it shapes your offers and how it really does. I think people often think that human design, I get questions a lot and you know, it’s sort of a joke with my clients where if you ask me, you know, what should my offers be?

What does my chart say? Well, your chart says a lot of things. It doesn’t say you should sell real estate. That’s not in the chart. That doesn’t come up. It doesn’t say you should be a health coach. Sometimes there are things in there that support it, or they might, more often it’ll show us what type of containers that you would probably like creating versus something else.

It’s so nuanced. So I’m actually gonna explain more my approach to human design and business building, and specifically how it helped me create these results and how human design was with me this entire time. So the other thing that I think is really important is like as I’ve expanded my business, as I’ve grown, I make multiple six figures a year.

Then I also keep over six figures a year, and that was not always the case. So I wanna say that for anybody who’s not keeping a ton of their money, I get that. I’ve been there too. That was a big thing for me. But increased revenue can sometimes be a vanity metric. Oh, I make $600,000 a year. I make this a year.

But then they keep none of it. I remember being at the Powerhouse Women Event last year, and one of the speakers vulnerably shared that she was like. I had this seven figure business, you know, we made like $3 million that year or whatever it was. It was something like that. And she’s like, and I kept zero zero.

I had nothing to show for it. I don’t wanna be in that boat. ’cause that actually sounds like a whole lot of work. I. And a whole lot of stress and not a very good life. What changes your life, and I’ve proven this to myself as well, is an increased profit margin, increased profit margins, increases quality of life, and that’s what I’m interested in.

And these are all just really important components and I’m gonna break down. Kind of just the three pieces that really matter here and how I put them together. And I’m actually gonna speak a little bit too about like if you haven’t hit the 10 K months yet, that’s okay. I’ll talk to you about that. ’cause it’s the same process.

We are just adding more fire to one piece of this process. When you start to scale, different things become higher priority at different stages, but it’s the same stuff that you’re doing for the most part. There’s really the same as far as the business building pieces of this. So at its core though, when we’re talking about scaling that concretizing season that we’re in, where we are now, the human design energy, what it’s supporting right now is this building stuff, and that’s really what scaling means.

Scaling means you are not willy-nilly doing things. You can’t scale and be willy-nilly. At least I never figured out a way to do that. Willy-nilly got me more work on me and me having to create more and me having to do more and me never feeling sure of anything and creating lots of things for the sake of creating them than taking a ton of energy, but not actually creating a ton of revenue.

And then I would spend more money to try to figure more stuff out, and then I kept less of my money. It was not fun for me. So just understanding that, that having a system and having something that is built, so this concretizing of a real idea that’s been born and a system that’s supports you, that allows you to, in the beginning, make money more in the manual fashion where you’re building something but you’re building toward it.

If I could get the years back that I built toward nothing, that I just built more stuff that I had to start from scratch or from zero with day after day, and then month after month, I would have the seven figure business right now, if I could get those years back. But I had lessons to learn. My hope is that with this episode, that you don’t have to learn those lessons the hard way, the way that I did, and you can get the benefit of my experience.

If you wanna go deeper with that, we’re actually hosting my Authority Accelerator Masterclass, where I take you through this entire thing in depth. I can only do so much in one podcast episode, even in a series, I could only do so much. So we have these sessions set out over five days. It’s a free masterclass.

This thing is so value packed and so jam packed. People love this and we’ve actually rewritten it. So the last time, every time I come back and I kind of make it new, but this last one that we ran just a couple of months ago. I rewrote the entire thing. So if you came to it a long time ago, please come again because we did it again and we did it so differently.

I speak about it so differently. I’m in a very different place right now than I was at the beginning of last year. So please come to this. This is honestly outside of this show. It is the most value packed, you know, just super, super valuable thing that I do that is free. So it’s your chance to kind of come and learn from me for five days and hang out and meet the rest of the people.

There’s already a great group going in Telegram. You have a chat going, it’s a lot of fun. All you have to do to register is to DM me on Instagram. I’m at Nicole Laino official. Send me a DM just with the word masterclass, and we will register you right there in the dms or go to Nicole Laino dot com slash masterclass and you can get registered right there on the website, whichever one you prefer.

Okay, so let’s talk about scaling, and let’s go back to before like the 10 K months thing before I hit $10,000 months. When I was still kind of struggling, where I would hit like a 10 K month and I’d go to eight K, then I’d have like a 5K month, and I was kind of like bouncing around all over the place.

If I go back to that time, a lot of that came from what I was talking about, that willy-nilly. I’m just, I’m creating this offer, I’m putting it out there, I’m creating this offer, I’m putting it out there. There was really no strategy behind anything that I was doing. It was just for today and really where that comes from.

And if you are there, I get it. Like I said, this was my story. If you are there right now or you’ve been there recently and you’re still maybe in that, you know like, am I really out of this yet? If you are in that place, it’s okay. But where that really comes from is there’s a bit of survival mode. We’re just sort of like, we’re right here and we’re just fighting for today that it’s like, I’ll just throw this thing out there.

I’ll just throw this thing out there. It’s like you can’t ground yourself long enough to look forward and to say, what do I wanna build? Because everything feels so immediate and so scary that you’re just like, I just have to do something now, and I’m a manifesting generator. We happen to be really, really bad culprits of this.

This phenomenon of over creating and just overdoing it all and feeling like we have to just put out all of this stuff. Have a million things, half built, putting all these different things out there, changing our branding, changing our offers, changing all these things like every other week. We are big culprits of this, but what human design did.

And this is the first thing, ’cause before I hit the 10 K consistent month thing, I hadn’t really found human design. I hadn’t really like gotten into it. And when I really started to live by it and allow it to work through me, not just learn about it, suddenly it got a lot easier to focus. Suddenly it got a lot easier doing the deconditioning and everything.

Suddenly it got a lot easier to show up every day and not allow the survival mechanism to take over. My nervous system wasn’t jacked up anymore. Actually, I was deconditioning. That’s where the EFT tappings come in and all the deconditioning work that I do is to unravel all of that. Small big T trauma that you’re holding that’s causing you to feel like today could be the last day.

You’ve gotta make everything count. You’ve gotta make it all work Now. Nothing slows you down more than the everything now and that feeling like I should be further, so I gotta make it happen now. You really sabotage your own results with that type of thinking and then acting on that type of thinking.

So this is what will cause you to spend so much money on coaches. That don’t really help you. That will cause you to just be wasting energy and wasting time, which is what I was doing before I hit the 10 K months. And that’s usually what the marker is when you’re hitting 10 K consistent months. It means you have some system underneath you and basically what you have is you have some system that has enough recurring revenue where you’re not starting from zero every month.

So you’re not just selling the flat products that you have something where there’s some payment plans or something that are coming in. Where every month you’ve got a little bit more, you’re starting with something more than zero, and hopefully every month that number grows. That recurring revenue number grows.

That’s the mark of something going for you. ’cause now you’re not in that survival mode. Now you aren’t in that, oh my God, it’s gotta happen today or it’s not gonna happen at all, and I’m gonna die. So that’s the first area that human design really started to make a difference for me, was I started to recognize where I was not being intentional with my energy and where I wasn’t really building anything towards something.

I was just throwing things at the wall and hoping that they stuck. Most of them didn’t stick. So it was a struggle that I created. So that’s the first thing is human design brings you back into like your truth. And this is where you find your real power is from this place of not having to listen to anybody else.

But when you do, you’re asking them for their expertise, but you’re able to come back and figure out, is that really right for me? Or can I take some of it and actually take action on what you take and lay the groundwork for something for you to build on foundations so that the house can stand on it after.

Don’t hang chandeliers from a house. That is built on sand. The chandelier isn’t important. If the house has no foundation, it’s going to fall over and that’s what most people are building and that’s what I built at the beginning. So if you’re looking to hit the 10 K months or you’re there and you’re looking to scale to like the 20 5K months that I’m at right now, the difference is really you are doing the same thing.

You are just testing more and doing more of the reps at that 10 K number. When you get to the 20 5K and you’re looking to get to that, it’s just about stacking that number more. It’s a lot of repetition. So these three elements are the pieces that are the ones that stand out as being like how we lay that foundation.

The first one is your genius. With your human design, and that’s outside of what I’m talking about, about being able to make decisions from your design and ground. I mean, actually what you’re here for. I mean actually building your brand around your design. This is a huge piece, and I’ll get into why this works so well and why this has such an effect.

And I’ll talk about, you know, some of my clients are having really interesting breakthroughs right now inside business by design. Just by kind of contemplating and exploring what their energy is. It’s been very interesting to see this kind of new crop that came in this spring and see how they’ve taken to the work and the things that have come up for them, and the little pivots and sometimes big pivots that they’re making in their business.

So the first one is your genius. The second one is your messaging. Messaging has to be there. And the third one is you need to create a semi evergreen content compounding ecosystem. And I’m gonna explain what each one of these means. The first one is genius by design. You know, really being able to dig into your.

Innate genius. This is what keeps you from bouncing from strategy to strategy or from wondering, is it this that I teach or is it this that I teach? We have a few people in the program right now who are kind of, they haven’t felt very connected to their business in a while to what they’re teaching, and I think the common misconception is.

I don’t feel connected to it, so I have to like radically change it. I have to take a sledgehammer to it and break it. And this happens a lot, not just with these newer people that have joined, but I hear this a lot. I either have to take a sledgehammer to the whole thing and burn it all down, or I have to keep doing the thing that doesn’t really light me up, and neither one of those is really true.

What is true is that when you start to explore your design, it’s such an interesting organic process, but you start to just see what you do in a different light. And I’ve talked on this show about how when I first found human design, it was like, well, do I have to get rid of the business stuff? Because I love human design so much.

That’s all I wanna talk about. I just wanna talk about human design and really the belief that I had in my head. Was that it had to be one or the other. That I couldn’t teach both, that I couldn’t market both, that I couldn’t do both, and that ultimately wasn’t the truth. And as I dug into my design more and I got more into the stuff that I teach now, ’cause there are very few people, I really had to.

You know, I’m not gonna say I came up with, I didn’t invent any of this, but I had to come up with my own process for figuring out how human design played a role in my business and in my marketing and in my branding. A huge piece was the Gene Keys. The Gene Keys opened tons of doors for me, but a lot of it was just my own contemplation and my own sitting with this stuff, and ultimately it turned into what I teach.

But what I landed on my incarnation cross is half very mystical. Very head centered inspiration. Gate 64, the Gate of Confusion. The gift is illumination. Illuminating a path that maybe is different for people. Illuminating a path that is aligned with possibility versus aligning with what you do not want or what you feel the past has dictated for you.

But then the other side is the most business focused gates in the entire body graph, the 45 and the 26. This is the business brain. This is the ego circuit, and that is what leads the energy of this cross. It’s far more ego leaning than it is the other two. So when I looked at that, it was like, oh, this is why it gave me a permission slip to see, to not feel like it had to be either or.

And then it gave me this playground to sort of have fun and toss this around and say, oh, well, how could these things go together? How would they fit together? How does this come through me? What is my magic? The more I thought about it, the more I worked with it, the more I noticed the shadows, the more I deconditioned, the easier it became.

The more this show changed, so much changed in my business and it came from human design. It came from me understanding what a five one was. It came from me really owning who I am. So, ’cause I’m selling, if you are thinking about joining me in my programs or buying a reading from me or something like that.

You are buying me. There are lots of people who do what I do. There are lots of people who do what I do really, really well, but the people who come to me, they come to me. For me, they are attracted to me, and that is because I am a living. Breathing, reflection of the gifts of my design. That’s what I work at every day, is how do I step into those gifts further?

And the more I do, the more everything works in my life. So it is both this intangible and tangible thing. And nothing will build your power greater than this. You’re connecting with your cosmic niche. You’re doing the things, it just, it feels like life is working with you. It makes it so much easier to trust that it’s all gonna work out.

It really does. It increases your magnetism. Life starts working better, and you start to figure out how you can run a business that feels alive again, that makes you feel alive again without having to destroy the whole thing. Most people are just like, oh, it’s just this tweak, and sometimes it’s just, it’s the courage that they needed to go all in on the thing that they wanted to do all along, but they were too scared to.

That comes from the human design piece. The second piece is messaging, and this is what I call cash content developing and creating cash content. And really what you need to do is you just need to start thinking in the language of sales. And when you think in the language of sales, that is not to say that you’re being salesy all the time, but you’re always thinking in a way where you are thinking about what you do and you’re thinking about what your person needs.

You’re thinking about how these two things fit together, and you’re doing that in specific ways. There’s specific ways that you can write content. And by content, I mean this show is content, obviously. The stuff that we put on social media, the emails, we write, all of it content. And I would go so far as to say that even when it’s not content, quote unquote content.

Even when you’re talking to people and you are sizing up a little bit about who they are, if you’re at an event and you’re like, my ideal person’s in this room, you’re the strategic 25 KA month entrepreneur, plus anybody who’s in the scaling aspect of their business. They know how to present themselves when they walk in a room.

So the people see them as the answer to their problem. They know how to pitch themselves without pitching. That’s the beauty of it. When you start to think this way, you don’t have to be hard pitching people. You’re actually just talking and they’re like, oh my God, I need what you do. I need what you say.

I need this in my life. That’s the beauty of it. And when you’re doing that, then everything you say and everything you put out builds demand for what you do for your offers. Now the third piece, the semi evergreen, what I call like I, I’ve been taken to calling it the content compounding ecosystem. I.

Because when we have a content compounding ecosystem, think about compound interest, right? Compounding is when we think about it with our content, it’s a content strategy that keeps paying out long after you created it. That’s what we want. The problem with Instagram is that you put content out there, then they’re not finding that, again, that algorithm dies a few hours after you put that post out there.

For the most part. And then you have periods like right now on Instagram, I think reach is terrible. Engagement is terrible. It has just been so slow and it’s just been a slog. I don’t like that. It’s too unpredictable for me. So Instagram is part of the strategy. It’s part of the ecosystem, but it’s not the only part of it because I don’t like how unpredictable it is.

I don’t like that. It doesn’t compound. That is just me making a deposit, but it’s not compounding. There’s no interest over there. Now, podcasting, YouTube, evergreen, bingeable long form, builds an audience, builds fans, really builds connection, puts your expertise out there, positions you as an expert.

Positions you as an authority and it’s bingeable where people can keep on going. I love this girl. You know how many times I’ve been told from people that they’ve listened to, you know, like they binged my episodes for two weeks and then they join my program for thousands of dollars. I have two people this week book business readings with me, which are over a thousand dollars.

Never spoken to them. Listened to a bunch of my episodes, and then bought immediately, never talked to them, didn’t ask me a question. Just saw the striped payment. That’s what I like. That’s semi evergreen. It’s not evergreen where it’s out there with like an ad and a webinar and all of this stuff, but it’s out there without me having to do a damn thing for it.

I put it out there and then the search engines do the job for me. People find me through various channels. Might find me through networking. They might find me through Instagram. They might find me through Google search. They might find me on YouTube because they watched somebody else’s video and then they served up my video.

All of these things could happen and I don’t really care, which, because they all lead to the same place. It’s just the place where I deliver. Really solid, excellent work that is a reflection of me, and it’s a reflection of what I do, and it directly connects to what you can pay me for. That’s what a system is.

That’s what a strategy is. And most people don’t have that, and I see it all the time. I see these people with these disjointed offers. I see them on social media and I’m like, why do I never hear about anything that you actually help with? I hear you excited about things. I hear like you have a personal brand where I like you as a person, but I don’t get why I would pay you.

I see what you do. You talk about your offers, you talk about the programs that you have and stuff, but I don’t know what those things are. I don’t know what, what value they would have to me. Maybe you could help me, but I have no idea and I see it. It’s more often than not. So I wanted to do this episode, but I certainly, if this.

Rang true for you. If this hit home for you, if this interests you where you’re like, I might need to hear more about this, about how do I build this system that’s actually gonna help me build 10 K and then 20 5K months, how do I do that? It’s about the compounding. If you’re interested in that, then please come to the workshop because that’s where I’ll be talking about the masterclass Authority.

Accelerator Masterclass. It’s five days, it’s free. Yes. Replays are available, always available unless we say that they are not. So you can jump in if you cannot make it there live with us, that’s okay. You can come and you can join us on the replay, and then you can join us in the telegram chat. Tell us what you thought, and still feel like you’re part of the group or don’t.

It’s up to you, but all you have to do to register for it, like I said, it’s totally free. Just register by DMing me on Instagram. I’m at Nicole Laino official. DM me the word masterclass. Only that word please. Otherwise it doesn’t trigger the bots gets us out and it won’t get you what you need. You’ll be waiting for me to do it manually and that will take longer.

DM me the word just masterclass, and then we will register you right there in the dms. Or if you prefer to go to the website, that’s fine too. Go to Nicole Laino dot com slash masterclass. You can register right there. Thanks for being here. I hope that you found this episode helpful. That is always our goal here, and I appreciate you making it all the way to the end of this episode.

Thank you. I appreciate you. And remember, in order to have an unshakeable business, you must first become an unshakeable human. So thanks for letting us help you become unshakeable with human design, everyone. We’ll see you next time.